Books-and-words gallimaufry

Updatery 

I have updated the Glimmerglass page, cutting and adding and tweaking, and wouldn't mind a bit any comments to improve it. Launch events will start later in the month. Right now I'm working on the final stages of a manuscript...

The Uses of Tolkien

I've noticed a growing number of slight mentions of of Tolkien in the context of current events. Victor Davis Hansen has just dug into that vein of comparison. Here Hansen analyzes the state of the world, launching off from The Lord of the Rings.

"10 books"

I'm loving all these facebook lists of books that affected people and stuck with them. Every now and then I bump into one of mine--so far I've seen A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, Ingledove, and Catherwood on lists. Catherwood is out ahead of the rest. Considering that people can dive back more than a thousand years through English language books alone, I am tickled.

 "10 books" from that lovely poet and man, Dave Favier

The King of Elfland's Daughter, Lord Dunsany
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt
Marx's 1844 manuscripts
A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Marly Youmans
All the Strange Hours, Loren Eisley
Leaves of Grass, Whitman
William Blake's lyric poetry
Juan Luna's Revolver, Luisa A. Igloria*
William Butler Yeats' lyric poetry
The Walls Do Not Fall, H.D.
History of the Civil War, Shelby Foote
Vanity Fair, Wm Thackeray
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Debt: the first 5,000 years, David Graeber

*Note: Luisa and I will be reading together this month! See here. I'll also be reading from Glimmerglass with Philip Lee Williams, Lev Grossman, Kelly Link (and Raymond-Atkins-if-we-work-it-out...)

Bill Knight commented, "I had Marly Youmans on my list as well, but it was "The Thaliad", not "A Death", which I have not read." So that's the first I've seen for Thaliad.

Free speech (h/t @prufrocknews)

Wordsmiths rely on free speech. Academics ought to know what it means. But in our time, is it any surprise that the chancellor of Berkeley gets it wrong? Administrators have a weird challenge; they tend to be tugged toward a Babel of obfuscation, sophistry, word-inflation, falsehood, and jargon. It's evidently hard to resist. Go here for an interesting takedown and analysis of the chancellor's letter to the university. Here's a sample:

First, observe the hidden premise Chancellor Dirks is presenting — that free speech must have "meaning." This implies that speech that does not have "meaning" — as defined, one presumes, by Chancellor Dirks or a committee of people like him — then it is not "free speech," and perhaps is not entitled to protection. Dirks is smuggling a vague and easily malleable precondition to free speech. There is no such precondition. Our rights are not limited by some free-floating test of merit or meaning.

It gets tougher from there...

The Ministry of Sanctioned Words teaches our children--

MSW proclamation! 

So I promise now that the newspaper and this website will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section. And nor will the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk.

The Ministry of Sanctioned Words continues on its mission to tell us what words are acceptable and what words are unacceptable. The Independent (UK) now informs the world  that it will no longer review "boy books" or "girl books" because they know what boys and girls like ought to read better than boys and girls do, and so in future they will only review--tada!--unisex books. Because The Independent knows better than you do what your sons and daughters ought to read. Got that? Good. Now go on your way, confident in the knowledge that The Ministry of Sanctioned Words cares for you and your children and knows what they should think and how they should choose books.

Categories

Plenty of boys and girls would cross reading lines of all sorts--genre, age categories, gender--if we quit categorizing absolutely everything and creating more and more new age levels. I wish children today could browse in a big, chaotic library without divisions and labels. That's the kind of library that was on offer when I was growing up, and I read plenty of varied books of all sorts, including books that The Independent would call "boy books."

The Independent against "boy and girl books"

But let's go back to The Independent and the issue of "boy and girl books." Little Johnny doesn't much like to read and has to be lured into a world he likes? Let's take away the few stories he does like--say, ones with native Americans clambering around on rocks and sometimes shooting things or communicating strangely with bears, a prehistoric boy who learns to carve after he is maimed, pioneer boys who run wild on the prairie... Those happen to be the sort of books my third child liked. My eldest son was a history book reader, but he also liked some historical "boy stories," and he adored Tolkien. Oops. Neither of my sons would be allowed to read what he liked under the rule of The Independent, which is evidently ambitious of transforming into an organ of The Ministry of Sanctioned Words. Meanwhile, my daughter didn't mind reading a boy-dominated book in the least. Nor did she mind a girl-dominated book. She just cared whether the book could be called good, and she preferred fantasy.

The Example of LOTR

Now let's go back to Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, a book that all three of my children liked; it clearly falls outside the category of "unisex book." Tolkien's complex tale is almost completely dominated by male hobbits and wizards, male humans and elves with the occasional side female (okay, Galadriel is powerful, I grant you, and Eowyn seems like a specific person, and Shelob--well, Shelob is quite a "she"), male ents who have lost their entwives, male orcs who never get any wives at all, ticked-off male ghosts, male furrin fighters from distant parts, etc. Auden defended the book as "part of a literary tradition of reinterpreting ancient archetypes to create a modern mythology," but it was primarily a male-dominated myth, despite the presence of a few female characters (The New Yorker.)

A lot of people like The Lord of the Rings. A poll conducted by Waterstone's bookstores and BBC4 found that readers in the UK thought The Lord of the Rings the greatest book of the twentieth century. This finding displeased some and pleased others. As Auden said, some find it "a masterpiece of its genre," while others "cannot abide it") An Amazon poll put the book as the best of the millenium (Salon.) (I somehow can't imagine that degree of rabidness pleasing Tolkien, a student of early languages and literatures.) Yet under The Independent's new rules, Tolkien would not be eligible for review.

Dear Independent, please review on merit

Independent, you are one of many papers I read when I'm on the hunt for reviews; I have read books editor Rebecca Davis. But this change is a bad idea. Why not stick to reviewing books on their merits? Toss out the categories and just divide the sheep (good books) from the goats (not-so-good to downright-terrible books.) Reviewing on merit is an old idea but still a good one--it's like a worn but still-useful proverb. Tried. True.

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The Great Big Book of Snot for Boys

Update: Thanks to the daily Prufrock News, I can tell you that Ron Dreher has already posted a note about this interesting development. Moreover, his post has a much more fetching title: "Stand Up for The Great Big Book of Snot for Boys!" Interestingly, we both have a familial concern for boy books. Studies have shown that boys can be very particular about what they read, while girls tend to be wide readers who will accept what we call "boy books"--I think it was Orange Prize research that showed the same about men and women.

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Coming up. Green men. Have a request?

Coming up next, maybe... A few days ago I wrote a post solving (purporting to solve) that insoluble puzzle, why green men are on churches and cathedrals. I'll upload it in a day or two. And I'm taking requests, questions, and general suggestions for future posts.

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Love or loathe the Ministry? 

Click on the Ministry tag below for more recent developments

in the public sphere and inside the ivory tower--

Chivalrous mice and other matters

Jeff de Boer, The Seven Samurai Mice
2005, copper, brass, mixed media, 4.5" x 3.5" x 2"
Back in 2007, I wrote a post about de Boer called
In the Realm of the Mouse Warrior.

From 4:45 a.m. until 9:15 p.m. yesterday, my life was given over to attending a gigantic and nigh-endless wrestling tournament. I am a wee bit . . . exhausted, without ever so much as tangling with an opponent. And I have a dire need to work on some essay commissions. So maybe today I'll give you some thoughts from a book I'm reading, On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, a collection of essays by C. S. Lewis. Here are some interesting snips from Walter Hooper's introduction.

This is a charming note:

C. S. Lewis can't have been more than five or six years old when he wrote, in a notebook he much later passed on to me, a story called 'To Mars and Back' and another little romance about chivalrous mice and rabbits riding out in full armour to kill cats.  --Walter Hooper

Here is a well-known quote from one famous name to another:

Just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by become a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man ascribe to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. --J. R. R. Tolkien to Lewis, quoted by Hooper

And here is another of the same, in the reverse direction:

Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to write some ourselves. --Hooper quotes Lewis to Tolkien, not long before he wrote Out of the Silent Planet

Lewis and drafts of writing:

Except for his academic works, Lewis never wrote more than a single draft of his novels, which indeed suggests that the stories were worked out in his head before he put pen to paper. --Walter Hooper

Here's a riposte to those who have attacked adult readers for reading books written for children or young adults:

When I was ten, I read fairy stories in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. WhenI became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.  --Hooper quotes Lewis, from "Three Ways of Writing for Children"

Narnia and Cair Paravel

As I'm still toiling in the endlessness of the flu, my husband amused me early this morning by reading from that excessively odd and sometimes alarming personage, Montague Summers. And the passage he read struck us both as interesting for the name Narnia, both for the name itself (the Italian name already being known) and for the creation of the Narnian world. (If you're not interested in children's books and Narnia, read another post!)

As is not surprising, you can find something about the sources for the name Narnia online; in Professor Downing's essay on names in the Narnia books, one learns, "As to the world in which we meet all these characters, there is an actual place called Narnia. It is best reached, not by climbing into a wardrobe, but by boarding a northbound bus from Rome. Narnia, now called Narni, is a mountain village in the Italian province of Umbria. Lewis would have encountered the name as a passing reference in Tacitus, Livy, and other Latin authors, and he probably liked the sound of the name."

As he had such marvelous libraries available to him for browsing and reading, I'm wondering if he peeped into Johannes M. Watterich's Pontificum Romanorum Vitae (Leipzig, 1862.) Montague Summers describes a matter contained in it this way:

A very extraordinary circumstance is related by Wipert, Archdeacon of the celebrated see of Toul, who wrote the life of Pope S. Leo IX, a Pontiff, who had been for more than twenty years Bishop of Toul, and who died in March, 1054. The historian [Johannes Watterich, I believe he intends here] tells us that some years before the death of S. Leo IX, the citizens of Narni, a little burgh which is picturesquely situated on a lofty rock at the point where the river Nera forces its way through a narrow ravine to join the Tiber, were one day greatly surprised and indeed alarmed to see a mysterious company of persons who appeared to be advancing toward the town. The magistrates, fearing some surprise, gave orders than the gates should be fast closed, whilst the inhabitants incontinently betook themselves to the walls. The procession, however, which was clothed in white and seemed from time to time to vanish among the morning mists and then once again to reappear, was obviously no inimical band. They passed on their way without turning to right or to left, and it is said they seemed to be defiling with measured pace until eventide. All wondered who these persons could be, and at last one of the most prominent citizens, a man of great resolution and courage resolved to address them. To his amazement he saw among them a certain person who had been his host many years before Ascoli, and of whose death he had been recently informed. Calling upon him loudly by his name he asked: "Who are you, and whence cometh this throng?" "I am your old friend," was the reply, "and this multitude is phantom; we have not yet atoned for the sins we committed whilst on earth, and we are not yet deemed worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven; therefore are we sent forth as humble penitents, lowly palmers... --Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960

The account goes on from there, as the living friend has a fit from astonishment and is ill for twelve months. Let that me a warning to you not to have truck with ghosts! And it's a reminder to me that 12 days (thus far) is not all that bad...

What strikes me is the "picturesque" little "burgh" on "rock" at the point where one water meets another water--here, it is where the Neva joins the Tiber. What we know as the royal seat of the Narnian world changes a great deal over time, but it fits--at one time or another--this description. Cair refers to walled city or castle. (Paravel most likely stems from tenant paravail, or the feudal concept of tenant-of-a-tenant, but that goes in another direction entirely, with the idea of the ruler as servant to Aslan, who is in turn servant to his father--and also with the idea of ruler as servant to those ruled.) At an unknown time, either in hope of fulfilled prophecy or for use, Cair Paravel was built where one great water meets another; that is, where the Great River, not long after it is joined by the Rush River, flows into the Eastern Ocean. Sometimes in its history, Cair Paravel is surrounded by city, other times not. Sometimes it is sited on a peninsula, and sometimes the sea takes it for an island, and it becomes a palace with protective walls of water. It is, like the "little burgh" of Narni, seated on rock.

Summers' retelling of the story of a ghostly pilgrimage passing by Narni suggests bonds with Narnia and Cair Paravel having to do with "thin places," where one world verges on another. The Narni of Watterich's account is a place on earth where world and the spectral meet and may even converse. It's a "thin place" where our world impinges on the realm of the dead. Likewise Cair Paravel is a border place, sited in the eastern coast and so suggestive of the unknown realm belonging to the Emperor Beyond-the-Sea who is the father of Aslan. The eastern edge is the closest one can come to him in the land of Narnia.

That's why the ruling seat of Narnia is neither at Lantern Waste (where the first human king and queen ruled), nor somewhere central like the spot where the White Witch set her camp. As the Eastern Ocean surrounds what was once a peninsula, Cair Paravel becomes more and more a "between" place that exists on the boundary between earth and water. Even its design reflects this identity. While it may be built stone on stone, the cair has an eastern door that can be flung open onto the Eastern Ocean, where the mermaids sing. As a "thin place" and as a border spot, it mediates between earth and water, between the four human kings and queens and the realm of nature, between civilization and the wild, and between all Narnia and the world beyond ruled by the Emperor Beyond-the-Sea, the King of all Kings.

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Tolkienesque postscript:
As my husband said, you can just imagine Lewis and Tolkien talking this story over in the Bird and Baby (more properly, The Eagle and Child, and less properly, Fowl and Foetus), one nabbing the name and the other daydreaming about an army of wanderers who have to work out their redemption by a particular task--one dayAragorn will hold them to their crime and allegiance.

Art and the path x 3

SPAM Just when the Balrog spam guards were heartily sick of eating spam (and wearing Ugg boots), along comes dessert spam: effusive flattery that actually seems to have made a 60-second attempt to grasp the blog. Nom, nom! The Balrogs scoop it up with big spoons! In answer to the pressing question of what the Balrogs look like, I inform you that they do not look like the one in the movie but rather like one of the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are. (Maurice Sendak, thank you for loving the world so intensely and being so full of vibrancy and grump!)

Alert! Don't forget to pop down and answer the question in the prior post. Comments here and elsewhere have been helpful.

Curious me-fact for the day:I have made it into the Wiktionary, it seems, with a word (and a number of lines) from The Throne of Psyche... I feel all sparkly. (Of course, that's probably just a new symptom of the myriad-minded viral Bug.)

Triptych. Below you will find excerpts from two recent reads and a reread that seemed to fit together in a challenging fashion. All deal with the making of fiction, virtue, transformations of the world, and more. See what you think!

The novel that reinvented fiction - John Banville

In Portrait of a Novel Michael Gorra has written a ringing affirmation of the power of fiction to explore and represent consciousness. It can be argued that the novel after James took a wrong turn and lost itself in the playground of the avant garde. What James was offering was a way forward from the bland smugness of the Victorian novel into a grown-up world in which fictional characters face squarely the difficulties of actual life, and by their example encourage us to do the same.

That way is wide and is still open to the novel; the journey awaits. Henry James knew the rigours facing the traveller along that path, knew the pitfalls that threaten and the gloom that pervades, yet he went on undaunted. As Dencombe, the novelist hero of James’s great story The Middle Years, puts it: “We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Once Upon a Time, There Was a Person Who Said, "Once Upon a Time" - Steve Almond

Ten years later, I continue to receive stories long on vivid camera work and short on coherence. These manuscripts all lack the same thing: an effective narrator.

Initially, I attributed this pattern to the modern pedagogy of creative writing — specifically the sustained dogma against exposition, which finds its purest expression in the mantra “show, don’t tell.” My teaching years made it clear that students were also mimicking — consciously and unconsciously — the dazzling visual media of film and television.

I have since come to believe that these manuscripts reflect a more fundamental cultural shift. In evolving from readers to viewers, we’ve lost our grip on the essential virtues embodied by a narrator: the capacity to make sense of the world, both around and inside us.

The best introduction to the mountains - Gene Wolfe

It need not be so. We might have a society in which the laws were few and just, simple, permanent, and familiar to everyone -- a society in which everyone stood shoulder-to-shoulder because everyone lived by the same changeless rules, and everyone knew what those rules were. When we had it, we would also have a society in which the lack of wealth was not reason for resentment but a spur to ambition, and in which wealth was not a cause for self-indulgence but a call to service. We had it once, and some time in this third millennium we shall have it again; and if we forget to thank John Ronald Reuel Tolkien for it when we get it, we will already have begun the slow and not always unpleasant return to Mordor. Freedom, love of neighbour, and personal responsibility are steep slopes; he could not climb them for us -- we must do that ourselves. But he has shown us the road and the reward.

Tolkien/Jacobson, genre/literary

Update: Book designer John Coulthart just sent me a link to this piece, in which he says Jacobson is more nuanced about genre. "The best fiction doesn't need a label." It looks interesting, and I'm going to read it now and then get back to work. Thank you, John!

High school started here on Thursday. The three children and I watched The Lord of the Rings trilogy in celebration of the start of the youngest's sophomore year in high school (the hallways of Orcs! the all-seeing principal Eye! the young women sharp as a blade!) and finished the last bit last night, finally obliterating the sign of sin and overreaching power in the volcanic flow of Mount Doom. Of course, the movies are nothing so complex as the book in three volumes that was praised by Auden and has been dearly loved and reread by many, but it got me considering that curious man, Tolkien, off and on all week. Last night I was thinking about how interesting it is that he disliked Macbeth and yet clearly does more than nod to it with his moving forest on Ent-march and his "no man" oracular prophecy and plot twist.

This morning I read Howard Jacobson's interview in the Guardian, where he says he is "contemptuous of genre things...." Not books but things. (I tend to be with Sendak in thinking that there are "good books" and then the others, but we live in a world where people like to categorize.) Jacobson goes on to reference without naming the Twilight series and then to cite 50 Shades. Ridiculously easy potshots! I'd like to see what he thought of Crowley's Little, Big, for example. He is also contemptuous of the term "literary fiction." He writes "fiction," he insists, while others write "crap." I know a lot of these attacks are a clever, Amis-like use of a media that desires column inches with sharp teeth and blood and hair. No doubt they are good publicity for the new book.

Those of us who write what is called "literary fiction" evidently want to be acknowledged as writing the only fiction that matters; that's why we desire that simple label, "fiction." What we do, we believe, matters more. But it ain't necessarily so. What I learned in writing two fantasies for young readers and a number of fantastic stories for anthologies is that our "literary fiction" worldview is provincial. Writers in other genres believe strongly that we write in simply another genre, one often less vital than their own. Sometimes they are right--depends on the book. It always depends on the book. Likewise, a book in another genre can clamber up to the heights. Entertainment may fly up into the realm of art. Why not? There are no rules, only the force and heart and skill of the mind behind the keyboard. What is The Tempest if not a romance of first love and a fantastic tale of a wand-wielding and -breaking wizard intended to please both the ruled rabble and the ruling classes?

Oh, I have sympathy for Jacobson's past situation, and am glad he has been lifted into light where he is visible. I know all about his "working away at the edges for years." No doubt the stacks of sold copies for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage and Catherwood and all the rest are but very little hobbits compared to the giant cave trolls of a Booker winner or a NYT bestseller. But hobbits are sturdy, lovable storytellers and song-makers. And the hinterlands and the edges have their advantages. From the edge, you can reach out into space that has no chart, building a world outward as you will. From the edge, the trends and bubbles of the day are only white noise, lost in the distance, and what matters from the past stands like a great field of monuments where a writer can lose and find himself in wandering.

Any of us "at the edges" would trade something for visibility, for a greater number of readers. But it's an old story; I imagine that Melville, say, would have been willing to give up a limb and hobble like a peg-leg sailor to keep the readers he had with Typee and gain a few more. Poe certainly wrote wild attacks with teeth and hair and gave up everything in search of a wider audience. Dickinson ventured out and then back, sealing the door. Yet they and others like them--some remembered, some not--had their painful, joyful, austere reward, just as Stephanie Meyers and the writer of 50 Shades of Gray have a reward of another kind. Let's look to Jacobson's "genre things" for what we must do about the strange ways of the world. As Gandalf says, what comes to those in a time "is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

Thanks to Damien Walter, Guardian columnist, for the Jacobson interview link.

Tolkienesque confession, with camellias

Middle-earth-style confession in the mode of neurotic comedy

The lovely light-elf parts of having a new book: hearing about people saying marvelous things to others in real life or e-life; receiving fan notes and letters about obtaining more rights; having other people be excited on behalf of the book; being gifted by Lady Word-of-Mouth; feeling a pleasant sense of flurry. The Dark-Lord parts: getting all in a twist because nobody has bought a book on Amazon for 36 whole-not-part hours, and how that must mean the thing has shriveled in an instant; having one's eye drawn irresistibly to numbers; worrying about marketing, done or left undone; despairing about the Precious! A new book means angelian Gandalf lolling on one shoulder, blowing smoke rings in the shapes of frolicking cherubs, and the eye of Sauron perched on the other, fiery and unblinking, clawed in place with iron eyelashes and burning a hole in one's nice elf-cloth.

And now I go do the laundry and then scoot off toward the dentist and then work on finalizing my "The Library's Child" talk in life that is not Middle-earth but has wonderful bits and magical trees and fascinating people all the same. Happy 51st birthday to my dear husband, Michael, a man I love just as much as when he had swaths of long blond hair--indeed, as much as when he had hair at all! XD

Links for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage Read chapter one at Scribd Book page See the new facebook page Goodreads giveway, April 15-May 15: 24 copies Amazon hardcover and ebook Indie bookstore search

Gaps and generation

The launch posts for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (several up already) have made me reflect on what I've said above the book being in part a kind of "filling of gaps" in family stories--not literally, but in a kind of search for wholeness or completion, even if it is not accurate to a family history.

I remembered Tolkien's use of philology and how that worked in a similar manner for him in The Lord of the Rings as a striking example of holes in material as being generative. Tom Shippey talks about Tolkien's inspiration as bedding itself in "literary gaps, errors, and contradictions" in J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (p. 325). and how through comparative philology, he could feel his way back to concepts long vanished.  "However fanciful Tolkien's creation of Middle-earth was, he did not think that he was entirely making it up. He was 'reconstructing', he was harmonizing contradictions in his source-texts, sometimes he was supplying entirely new concepts (like hobbits), but he was also reaching back to an imaginative world which he believed had once really existed, at least in a collective imagination: and for this he had a very great deal of admittedly scattered evidence" (p. xv).

It's the same idea, although in Tolkien's case a far more complex one:  the knowledge of early language giving rise to thoughts about word origins and a sense of the past that  allowed him to bridge uncrossable places in texts.  Hints and clues (the word for dwarf in various languages, mentions of elves, scraps of lost poems) gave rise to a whole world, much as the tip of an iceberg makes one imagine and half-perceive a great, visionary mountain of ice under the sea.

Mine is a very different sort of book, despite there being a journey in each, and the bridge-making relates to different sorts of gaps. But the inspiration comes down to the same thing: a longing to know and understand absences makes the writer dream up a kind of wholeness--not an accurate wholeness but one that is true to the story and to the bits of existing knowledge.

Launch interview, part 2: at Dale Favier's mole burrow
Launch interview, part 1: at Hannah Stephenson's The Storialist

Invitation to participate